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Struggled through this book at times due to Bakunin's frequent digressions ... But when he stays on point, you get gems like this:

"...religion is a collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly, and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother's milk, absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so exclusively fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his being, that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and even then never completely succeeds."

"It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another."

...which is why those of free-thought can never win a debate against those who have convinced themselves, by being bred from existence, to be without escape from this "mother's milk."

What I love most about Bakunin is his admission that the very moment he puts his ideas into words onto paper, they have become subject to antiquation. He recognizes that bc the future will undoubtedly be ripe with greater knowledge than he would have had access to in his own time, his ideas aren't so "awesome" as to keep them free from criticism. This grants me a sigh of relief towards listening to his premises. He had no intentions of writing a holy bible himself.

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Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Russian: Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Баку́нин; 30 May 1814 – 1 July 1876) was a well-known Russian revolutionary and philosopher, theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general.